This year's Cannes film festival will pit a roster of festival veterans, including four former winners of the glamorous film competition's top prize, against challengers from emerging cinema hotbeds from China to the Philippines.

European governments sought to contain the deepening world financial crisis on Wednesday, with Britain stepping in to help its hard-pressed banks and Russia shutting down its biggest stock market for two days. But the greatest relief to markets came from a coordinated rate cut from leading world central banks.

The recipe for Campari, the bright-red aperitif of literary and movie fame from Hemingway to Bond, has been a tightly held secret for almost 150 years. Two people know the blend of herbs -- and one must attend anytime a batch is brewed.

Most everybody knows what Christmas caroling is, but who does it anymore?Sure, there's the new twist: virtual caroling. A Radio Shack ad shows how it's done: Little old lady opens her door to find video iPod. Out comes tinny sounds and tiny pictures of children singing Hark, the Herald Angels Sing. Next door the kids are waving from a window.

In just 10 years the number of wineries in New Zealand has mushroomed from about 200 to more than 550. And worldwide exports have increased fivefold over that span, to 6.4 million cases annually. That makes them a small but important player in the world market. More important, this growth has stimulated international curiosity and begat a wine-tourism element that is helping to lead the country into the postLord-of-the-Rings era.

Popular wisdom was that the end of the Lance Armstrong era would also be the end of Americans' interest in cycling. The fans watching the Amgen Tour of California didn't get the memo: Race organizers are predicting that the event will break its own record as California's biggest sporting event since the '84 Olympics.

Sharing your negative opinions of people behind their backs is a strong way of building relationships with others stronger even than saying nice things, according to a study led by a former University of Oklahoma psychology professor.

Odds are, unless you're a college English major, you haven't read Beowulf in years if you read it at all. Which makes the sudden flourishing of the 1,000-year-old epic in popular entertainment all the more peculiar.

Stanley Kunitz, a former U.S. poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner whose expressive verse, social commitment and generosity to young writers spanned three-quarters of a century, has died. He was 100.